


dum spiro spero

by crescentius



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Alcohol, Angst, Drabble, F/M, Gen, Hopeful, Light Angst, Other, Sad, We Die Like Men, did not beta this, drabble i wrote in 2016, its a word vomit yes, kind of like a character study?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-05
Updated: 2020-09-05
Packaged: 2021-03-06 14:29:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,114
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26300440
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crescentius/pseuds/crescentius
Summary: Tooru falls. He feels pain. It’s not that he can’t help himself up, but that he can’t nurse his wounds by himself.No one is.
Relationships: Oikawa Tooru/Reader, Oikawa Tooru/You
Comments: 2
Kudos: 7





	dum spiro spero

Tooru falls.

This is for the first time, but it felt like he’s done it for a million times in all of the lifetimes he might have lived.

He’s tired of it but he still feels all the same. Unworthy. Never enough, and he have abandoned all hope that this curse would ever leave him because he still feels the same; different times, the same pain over and over again.

Why is it that people say that things should always be enough, but is also fine to make sure of having more than enough? Why is lack, then, a bad thing? Can something ever replace the lack he has for his whole life he’d been trying to replace? Fill it with mediocrity, of all the important things in the world, take everything, the less, the lowly, and say it is gold, when it is pyrite from the start—unmalleable when tested, fake from the very start?

Tooru thinks.

Tooru thinks late night thoughts.

And he thinks. Until these very thoughts, the good and the bad, that put him to sleep; body rested but spirit at unease.

It is the rambunctious ring of the alarm that wakes him from slumber.

And his mind is still tired.

It is time for the monotonous routine of his.

* * *

It was done.

And the grim expressions of everyone proved that they were nowhere near of having the chance to stay on the court for another time.

Here, they were condemned.

And here they stood and accepted the verdict.

Here they fought a battle.

And here they lost the war.

Tooru took a deep breath and took up a façade that shook the very barriers of lies he made up for so long. Tooru isn’t just lying to himself. He’s lying to everyone he’s ever known, and it hurts. It hurts having to do this, and watching the people he knows buy it. “Thank you, Oikawa, you’ve really done much.” Thank you, but the bitter truth is far away from it. Hours after they’ve trudged from the tribunal of efforts and sweat and blood and tears and into their homes, Tooru strayed and wandered aimlessly. There were people around him, occasionally. But they were never acknowledged as much as he never really put much thought into what they ever thought of him. Not now, not ever. He’s too tired of putting up a front.

Tooru continued walking. Not that his feet were beginning to tire, but he didn’t notice the shops closing, and the people reducing from occasionally to none.

He felt the cool air play by the tips of his hair and he decided that he should take a rest. His feet brought him to the park and at the stairs and near the top, he sat. Tooru tucked his knees to his chest, took a deep breath and the tears began to fall. The tears were falling because of his fault. Because he is incompetent. Wrong. Insufficient. And never enough. He doesn’t speak because he knew his words would fail him, and would prove that he wasn’t enough, terribly insufficient words aren’t able to express the kind of stupidity native only to a certain Oikawa Tooru.

The tears ran down and they ceased on their own. Tooru felt numb. Tooru wiped his tears using the sleeve of his jacket negligibly and stared up at the sky.

The stars were shining bright and the moon ever brighter that seemed to mock him. Was he, then, supposed to be up there, in the company of these majestic heavenly bodies; when he’s too unworthy, then, sentenced to live a life like this?

“You know that stars die too, right?” Tooru heard from a voice beside him. He was too fixated on the stars that the person that sat beside him didn’t seem to project a sense of presence.

“I know,” he sighed. The person, she, held a metal container with a circular cover attached to the body, a hip flask. She shook it and he heard the swish of the contents, the sound of it being only slightly full.

“That they’re as beautiful when born and as beautiful when they die,” Tooru nodded, “truly, elegant things. Beautiful, truly, from birth to death as if they never really die.” She speaks and adjusts the scarf on her neck.

“They deserve that much. They are enough on their own,” Tooru’s voice came out raspy and he decided not to care, that he’s too tired to care. He closes his eyes and felt it sting. That might be because of the crying. He sighs.

“Do you want one?” she says, offering the container. It smelled like alcohol. Tooru looked at her incredulously. She shrugged.

“I didn’t feel like myself so I thought, ‘maybe I’d do something who I myself wouldn’t.’ Just for tonight. To unwind. Just a little, to prevent everything from falling apart.” She offered the container at him again. She looked like she’d accept what he’d decide at any way, so he accepted, following her words. He waved it to his lips and took a quick gulp. It burned slightly, but he didn’t care anymore.

Tooru would take anything to relieve him of this feeling.

He gave her the container back and wiped his mouth by the back of his hand. She took a swig herself and sighed a sigh that seemed years older than her.

“I take it that you’re not okay,” she says and leans back and stares at space. Tooru takes a deep breath, smiles pitifully at himself and at the situation he’s in, and speaks.

“I am not. Clearly.” She chuckles as a response, and Tooru didn’t really mind why and what for.

“Then so be it. You’re not human when you don’t.” She turns her head to him and points out his red eyes and the tear marks and the state he’s in for the past consecutive hours. He agrees, and looks at her too. Not too dramatic, as he imagines himself to be, and yet, feels she is here for the same reason as he is. If she doesn’t feel like herself, then who he is right now is the worst self he never wanted to face.

A question still bugs him.

“Am I still one when I’ve never been enough?” he asks, his eyebrows together, furrowed, and him entering a state of frustration deeper than where he was earlier.

“You are,” she replies and takes another drink. The trees seemed to speak to each other by the sound the leaves were making. A song for each other, they chorus in unison.

“Because I’m like this?” He takes the hip flask and drinks. He stretches his legs and puts his hands behind him to lean back.

“We all have our moments. And yours is this. At this day. At this time. In this illusion. In here with me.”

And Tooru thinks of what illusion, of what with her.

“Would you tell me why?” Tooru asks, Tooru pleads. The night sky fell to a standstill, the stars and the moon held by a person too nervous enough to move, the wind brought back to its master, the songs of the trees silent for a moment.

“You should know that nothing is ever enough. That enough is nothing. That the word itself is nothing, is as irrelevant as the fucking dirt that rests at the bottom of our shoes. The word itself is dead, and the living breathe life into it.

“It is a ghost that haunts the person who uses it.

We are human beings condemned to live our lives to adhere to what is enough. What is enough? Who told you that that is enough? No one. But why do we chase to have it in our hands? Listen, you are enough, no, you yourself is perfect and no one should tell you why you aren’t. You might have taken a lot of work to achieve the recognition of a dead word but the work you put yourself into is a factor that made you as perfect as you are. And you are perfect as you are.”

Tooru stared at her. She smiled and her smile told him that it would be okay. Her eyes weren’t lying as his eyes would be doing, and it made him believe in her words. Her words are real and authentic and tangible, so tangible he felt it like a gust of wind on a bleary day. The words are real, as much as he is.

Tooru put his hands together like a silent prayer. In a side way glance, he found her fumbling around the hip flask, her fingers going around the cover repeatedly, closing it shut, turning the cover over and over, closing it, and letting it fall open again. After that routine, she’d sigh and close her eyes for an amount of time.

Tooru knows something, a glimpse, from the way she moved, the spot-on mannerism she developed. How he does and knows, he can’t explain. He just did.

“If you aren’t yourself, what made you?” He started, trying to dig on the surface of her doings.

“I don’t know, really. How is it that I can do something fairly but at this one thing, which is important to me, I fuck up?” she asks, turning to him with a look he thought he wore at the beginning of their conversation.

“Everyone’s bound to fuck up at this one thing,” he offers, noticing her take another drink. ‘Humour me,’ he tells himself.

“Look at me, for example,” he laughs bitterly, “and maybe I’m bound to fuck up at this every single time,” Tooru continues. She nods.

“”But have you ever felt you’ve done enough? What you think is your best?” Tooru asks.

“Yes,” she sighs, handing Tooru the container and puts her hands on her face, rubbing it.

“I do.” She mutters through her hands, retrieving the flask from Tooru who took a sip. And another.

“Then at least you know. And that you won’t have regrets over it, unlike me,” he mumbles. And then they’d both forget that it ever happened, even for just a second.

“This will pass. If I am what I am now, then tomorrow I’d be back the same, only much better. Believe it.” She smiles at Tooru and he wants to reciprocate the action, he terribly wants to, he does. But he remembers Iwa-chan tell him, as he always knew, that his smiles aren’t all genuine as he makes it appear. Now he doesn’t want to lie to himself to project to others. Not anymore.

And if the stars and the moon and all the heavenly bodies can emit such grace amid the stillness of the universe, unmindful of the havoc of a small planet that seemed to know and seek to know more, then Tooru can, too. Maybe start it, like now, with her.

But still, how?

“Why then,” he inquires, noticing the still silence of everything, and the temperature, finally settling in a lower setting, “are you here with me?” he asks her. His eyes glazed with tears that would very much like to fall down from his face and water the ground with emotions packed in each little drop.

Tooru blinks them back.

Not now. Not ever. Not anymore.

She takes Tooru’s hand in hers, opens it with his palms facing the heavens and drops a paper, blank, albeit slightly crumpled. She smoothes the paper on Tooru’s hand and produces a pen. Holding the paper on his hand in place, she clicks the pen and draws a small dot on the center of the paper.

“This is you,” she points on the small dot. She draws several others around the small dot on the center and connects the circles outside by drawing a line around them.

“This is the others, the people you know and care about,” she explains. Then she draws another circle on the very edge of the paper and points to it. She inhales a deep breath.

“And this is me.” She breathes out and puts her pen back in her pocket. Tooru stares at the paper and at the dance the ink made to make her diagram come alive. Tooru’s mind is still confused when he turns to look at her, his hands keeping the sheet of paper in place.

“Because at least with me is much better, much easier than with them,” she smoothes her shirt and pulls on the hastily put-on cardigan.

“Because we aren’t anything close to being friends or somewhere closer than that, and you won’t delve into that fact for you’re burdened with something. And really, I’m just a number in billions of others. And it’s easy to forget. It’s easy to forget once it’s out. Once it’s out, you’ll forget, slowly. And it won’t hurt anymore.”

Tooru nods. He knows he is still troubled, but with the things that occurred tonight, he is sure that this never happened in either any of his lives lived, if he wants to believe that. And of this Tooru is sure.

He’d let go.

Maybe someday, once he is over it, he’d go to Iwa-chan and tell him that his smiles will sure be genuine from now on.

Of course, it won’t be as often as Tooru’s smile has always been, but it will be authentic. No fabrications, no whitewashes. And Tooru will actually tell what he feels, no matter how it is placed; be it black or white or shades of varying colours. It may bring him good or into trouble, but it is real. And it is what he feels.

Tooru will let go.

And Tooru will be free.

Tooru will leave it all, tonight.

Tomorrow, he’ll be a free man. He’ll do what he wanted to do and whatever it is, he will do it. Maybe he’ll fly, but completely his own.

But her.

“Wait.” He says, catching her attention. She hums a response.

“Why unwind to not let everything fall apart when it is just as close to falling apart?” She smiles at this, and he does, too. For letting go is one step at a time; forgetting is. And maybe with her is a right place to start.

“You have to take a few steps back to know, to learn wherever you might have gone wrong,” she says, and chuckles, “I’d be damned to say, it does apply in maths and science, as much as I’d care to admit, but it works, it really does.” ‘And it’s true,’ Tooru admits to himself, being a person who always used to stop at the word ‘almost’ but never really ‘it’. But it does not matter anymore.

He’s finally one step farther than that.

Finally.

She seemed to give him something he never had, of something so far it comes by fast, a blurring event. Something Tooru might have missed, of something he could have had, like fire, its wrapping flames. Like the sound of the firewood crackling, something he loved.

“It is in these moments that we live for,” she speaks, and reached out to touch Tooru’s hair.

“If to be human is to feel, to feel pain and accept it as our own, then maybe we are more human than any human will ever be.”

Tooru felt her hand hovering above his head, and waited, expected for its weight to bear down on him. It didn’t come, it was fine all the same, but he wanted to feel her touch, and hope for a familiar weight, for that familiar sensation of fleeing numbers, of generations past.

The dark of the night have kissed her features, with the shadows that wrapped around her, but the moonlight completely stole her away.

Tooru sighs and runs a hand through his hair and does it in his own time, at this particular pace, in his own leisure. The cold seeps in his clothes at a faster rate and it seems like his jacket started to melt, unable to fulfil its function. Tooru starts to feel more, and not in the type to be like a general assessing the capabilities of the opposing army like he does in a game, but in the raw side of things, of what is actually around and with him.

It is starting and it’s not really a bad thing.

Tooru smiles.

He presses his hands on his thighs and straightens his back. He looks at her and smiles. The wind picked up its pace and the songs resumed, the leaves fluttering, flirting with the wind, whispering, singing songs to each tree, each to its own.

Tooru opened his mouth to speak, but the words seemed to be stuck, hanging at the end of his tongue, his heart in his throat. He can’t say it, he seems to be not able to say it, but hands, his whole self, wanted to touch her, maybe let her feel how he is, and he really is, thankful of her, of her words, of her presence, of her.

She turns to him, shaking the now empty hip flask, of which they shared frustrations, curses, and wisdom with.

“It’s fine,” she smiles back, tucks the hip flask at the back of her pants, dusts off the dirt from her clothes and from her hands. She spared Tooru a smile that reached her eyes and walks away.

She knows.

She walked away and Tooru thinks.

Tooru thinks thoughts like these.

The crinkling of the paper brought him back to reality. His body languid, he entered his home and didn’t fuss around with things as much as he usually does. He went to his room and laid down, counting the stars he thought he saw imprinted in his mind before sleep would take him.

Tomorrow, Tooru will start living.

Tooru thinks.

Tooru thinks late night thoughts.

And he thinks. And she was the person Tooru thought he could never live without.

* * *

She never told him her name, but in that moment, Tooru was in her whole life as much as she did in his.

And he swears.

Tooru swears to the being above, and to whom that might be lounging up there, looking at them, the two numbers in billions.

He swears he loves her, might have loved her, should have loved her, would have loved her.

Tooru loved her.

He fell hard.

Tooru falls.

This is for the first time, but it felt like it’s been nothing like the million times in all of the lifetimes he might have lived.

* * *

Tooru falls.

This is for the first time.

And he’d gladly fall again in his next lifetime if it all were for her.

**Author's Note:**

> this was written in 21 January 2016 and i never had the guts to post it on any platform.  
> four years after and now, in 2020, i am wallowing in the fact that hq ended, i thought, why not? since i have been in a writer's block limbo for three years now (yes its that bad)
> 
> hope i did oikawa's character justice, with all that is happening in his head after that match. the "her" i wrote is what i see as a person who shows a different perspective. we all encounter such person in our lives. 
> 
> hit me up in my writing twt if yall so choose @helioswrites or at my anitwt @bokutosthighs
> 
> have a good one. <3


End file.
